Men and Their Castles (Shemini Atzeret 5787)

Men and Their Castles (Shemini Atzeret 5787)

Sep 30, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Maybe it’s because I come from a family of three boys. Or maybe it’s because I’m the father of three boys. Or perhaps it’s because I spent so much time in the Boy Scouts as a kid, or that I went to an Orthodox rabbinical school whose students were all young men. Whatever the reasons, I’ve long cared about masculinity and the experience of men.

I can remember already as a college student noticing that feminism seemed to have given many women I knew a more robust vocabulary for articulating what it meant to be a woman—and that a lot of men seemed to struggle in comparison. And though gender conversations have only gotten richer and more complex in the ensuing decades, the situation when it comes to masculinity doesn’t feel like it has gotten much better. If anything, it may have gotten worse.

From the Access Hollywood tape to “Quiet, Piggy,” the most powerful man in the world (one of them, anyway) has subjected the culture to a decade of shallow, toxic and violent masculinity. And the culture has followed suit: Humility and open hearts have been out, arrogance and closed fists have been in. As a father, I have worried about raising young men in such a culture.

This week I felt some more jolts. First I read about the latest outrageous attack on Palestinians by about 100 young Jewish men in the West Bank, which included the torching of homes. And then I read about violent, abusive hazing of pledges by the AEPi chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (AEPi is a Jewish fraternity; my son is a member of the University of Illinois chapter.)

There are undoubtedly other elements to both these stories, but I can’t help but wonder about how the young men involved in them imagine what it is to be a man—and whether a different conception might have a healthy effect. Because both of these stories have come to light during Sukkot, I’ve been thinking about them in the context of the sukkah and home.

We can trace the origins of a good chunk of our ideas—and even our laws—about home to ancient Rome. Central to the Roman concept of the domus was the notion of the paterfamilias, the male head of household—who could exercise virtually unchecked power within his property. Hence the phrase: “A man’s home is his castle”—emphasis on man. All of which is to say that gender roles and ideas of home are deeply interwoven.

Sukkot, of course, comes to upend our idea of home: Our home is not, in fact, our castle. It is not a place to be closed off and seemingly protected from the rest of the world. Farkert, just the opposite: Home is a place, a state of being, in which we are existentially, spiritually secure enough to open up—to guests, to the precariousness of nature, to the unknown, to the stranger. A man who is animated by deep fear of protecting his home from threats is, more often than not, a man who isn’t at home with himself. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in his classic, The Dignity of Difference: “Those who are confident in their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faith of others. In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need that confidence now.”

This Shabbat marks Shemini Atzeret, the final holiday in our fall cycle. Outside of Israel, it is also the Shabbat on which we traditionally read Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). So, two teachings.

The first is a commentary on a midrash about a verse from Kohelet: “Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king…” (4:13) The Midrash offers: “‘A poor and wise child’—this is the Good Inclination (Yetzer Hatov); ‘an old and foolish king’—this is the Evil Inclination (Yetzer Hara).” Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa adds: “The Evil Inclination is called an ‘old king’ because it ages and renders everything stale. The Good Inclination is called a ‘child’ (yeled) because it continuously renews and refreshes everything; and it is called ‘poor’ (misken) because it is humble. Since it is humble, it is always happy, for the source of joy is found in humility (hachna’ah).”

I don’t think the humility Reb Simcha Bunim is talking about is meekness. I think it’s self-awareness, which is the foundation of being able to make space for others in the world. Such humility is the touchstone of a kind of at-homeness—and masculinity—that is not about shutting out or dominating others, but the spacious generosity that gives rise to genuine joy.

Thus the second teaching, which comes from Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk (1730–1788). Like many others, he notes that Shemini Atzeret is unusual: “It has no matzah, no shofar, no Four Species.” There is no symbol on this holiday. Why? “On Shemini Atzeret, we reach the level of supreme joy, which does not require any external symbol—this is the joy within one’s essential self. One is full of sadness and worry only when one is far from oneself. However, when one becomes close to oneself, joy overflows. Shemini Atzeret is a holiday unto itself (b’atzmo): a holiday of the joy of full selfhood (atzmiut).”

This, of course, does not only apply to men, it applies to all human beings of all genders. All of us are on our own version of the collective journey towards what we hope can be healthy, secure, open and generous human lives. Having dwelled in the spiritual safety of the sukkah, may we step back into our homes with a renewed faith in ourselves, in our Torah, in the Divine, and in one another—and may we live with the courage to make our homes and the world a sukkat shalom.

Just Passing Through (Sukkot 5787)

Just Passing Through (Sukkot 5787)

Sep 24, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

For the last couple of years, it has felt at times that our youngest child, who turns 14 in a few weeks, has needed his own social secretary. Between school and camp, he has attended a veritable parade of coming-of-age celebrations (bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, b-mitzvahs—or as the van of a local non-kosher caterer that nevertheless does a lot of Jewish events puts it a little ironically, “mitzvahs”). There have been stretches of many weeks where he has spent Shabbat at someone else’s home, only to go that evening to a party for another friend in a different community. It’s frankly quite a wonderful problem to have.

These affairs have been a real study in contrast and diversity. Some are pretty modest, with food that’s often homemade and a synagogue social hall that has been decorated by the family. Others have been galas at swanky hotels or event venues, with live bands and fancy hors d’oeuvres. Some are strictly kosher, others make accommodations for kosher-keepers. Some involve mitzvah projects as part of the event, others talk about a project the child-now-adult (sort of) has done on their own time. If the four species of Sukkot (palm, myrtle, willow, and citron) represent diversity, then Toby has had a tour of it over the last two years.

I don’t think it’s just the rabbi in me, nor the career nonprofit professional in me, that finds myself most drawn to those celebrations where the essence is strongest: Where, no matter how stylish and numerous the giveaways may be or how famous the entertainment is or how many people the family was able to employ in putting on the event, what comes through is a sense that this child and this family are living a meaningful, thick, and sacred Jewish life. I hope that Toby and his friends—and, let’s be honest, their parents and grandparents—feel that way too. That, as our friends down the proverbial religion street might say, is the reason for the season.

I wrote recently about Dolly Parton, and her reminder to us that, no matter how much we may acquire materially in life, we can’t take it with us. After what has hopefully been a process of healthily right-sizing ourselves during Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, Sukkot provides us with a physical opportunity to explore and metabolize this lesson further.

Hillel Zeitlin, the great Warsaw teacher of neo-Hasidism, shares the following teaching:

The Sukkah contains many symbols and secrets enumerated in the midrashim and books of kabbalah. But the simplest allusion of all is that we have nothing to rejoice over in our world when we are in a good state, nor is there any reason to be grieved when we derive no pleasure from it. In either case, we are nothing but sojourners here.

So far, so Buddhist. The sukkah, with its nature as a temporary dwelling, invites us to experience and embody impermanence—which can help us liberate ourselves from whatever emotional state we might be in. As the Torah itself states, “You are but strangers and sojourners with Me” (Lev. 25:23).

But Zeitlin continues with something more than impermanence:

There is no sense or purpose to our lives if we have not acquired something good here. To what is this comparable? To a merchant traveling to a fair whose primary concern is not to find a good inn, but rather the merchandise he will purchase there. And if one finds a good inn there, but returns from the fair empty-handed, what does he have to show for the whole fair?

So the goal is not simply to let go, it’s also to acquire—which seems like a paradox. How can you let go of things if you’re trying to acquire things at the same time? The answer, it would seem, is that we want to be acquiring the right goods: not those things that might seem to have greatest material value, but those that are of the greatest spiritual worth—the things, perhaps, that money can’t buy.

Zeitlin concludes the teaching with a story often told about Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, also known as the Chofetz Chaim, the name of his work on mindful speech:

They tell of a certain rabbi, a genius and a tzaddik, whom a passing guest entered to visit in his home, and found no furniture in his house.

The guest asked him: “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” “And where is your furniture?” the Rabbi answered him with a question. “Why, I am merely a guest passing through!” “And I, too, am merely a guest here,” the Rabbi answered him.

Sukkot is an exercise in recalibrating our sense of at-homeness. “All seven days of Sukkot,” says the Mishnah, “one should make one’s sukkah their permanent dwelling, and make their house their temporary dwelling” (Sukkah 2:9). If home is a place in which we feel powerful, into which we can invite guests, then Zeitlin’s teaching about the Chofetz Chaim invites us to ask, What is it to be at home in a world in which we are already fundamentally guests to begin with?

That, of course, is not only a question for Sukkot. But the holiday is a time when we are invited and challenged to enter it deeply. So, this Sukkot, what illusions about our permanence are we holding onto that it’s time to let go? What truths about our own impermanence do we ignore that it’s time to take up? And how can we live as guests in this world while helping all to feel welcome and at home?

A Sukkot Teaching about Holy Garbage and Sacred Leftovers

A Sukkot Teaching about Holy Garbage and Sacred Leftovers

Sep 22, 2026 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

The legally minded Talmudic Sages, and all the commentators who interpreted their teachings, had a field day with the laws for building a Sukkah. They discussed and discerned details about every aspect of this temporary structure that we treat as if it were our permanent home for seven days, while we relate to our solid, weather-proofed, comfortable homes as merely temporary. They debated about the size of the sukkah, where it can and can’t be built, what its walls can be made of and how many are necessary. And the leafy-roofed schach, the most important and distinct part of the sukkah, garnered particularly detailed attention.

This year I learned a marvellous new detail about the schach. Talmud Sukkah 12a quotes the biblical verse׃ “After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your winepress, you shall hold the Festival of Sukkot for seven days” (Deuteronomy 16:13). The Sages of the Talmud interpret this verse to mean that after pressing the juice from the grapes you’ve harvested and threshing and winnowing the grain from their stalks, you are to take the husks, the bare vines and dry stalks and use them, use these empty leftovers, to grace the roof of your sukkah. 

This seems like such a contradiction to the general practice of hiddur mitzvah – adding beauty to each mitzvah we do. The other aspects of Sukkot are certainly oriented toward hiddur, like choosing the most beautiful etrog you can find, gathering in the gorgeous abundance of the harvest, decorating your sukkah and adorning yourself with joy – our hearts and faces shining with gladness. And yet, we use organic garbage for the schach.  

In Sod Yesharim, Sukkot 1:4, Rabbi Gershon Chanoch Henoch Leiner of Radzyn (1839-1890, a Hasidic rebbe of the Izhbitza-Radzin dynasty) teaches about the spiritual significance of this holy refuse.

He notes that what we regard as waste is actually the essential kelipah/the outer husk that protects the fruit. Under the schach made of kelipot, the sukkah protects us. There must be enough schach to create more shade in the sukkah than sun. It protects us from wind and light rain. And while our homes of brick and steel also protect us, when we are in them, the elements are concealed from us. Only in the permeable sukkah, where we are still exposed to the elements and feel them on our skin, do we experience a direct felt sense of refuge, simultaneously feeling both vulnerable and protected.

And it is through this embodied experience of physical protection that we let our hearts and awareness fall open to the underlying spiritual protection that is ever-present. The kelipot above our heads aren’t merely metaphor. In Hasidic understanding, everything in the physical world is the outer garb of divine Presence. Used and empty husks are as much expressions of holiness as are the ripe and beautiful fall squash and melons, the clear blue autumn sky and the radiant people around our tables. The Zohar describes the sukkah as tzila demehemnuta, the shade of faith/trust. We dwell in the shade of sacred husks and touch the truth that there is no place absent of divinity. Sitting in a simple hut under the most ordinary, discardable leaves, the physical and spiritual interpenetrate as you feel the way you are held in Life in a beautifully simple way. Consciously, softly, you allow yourself to trust enough to relax into the arms of it – bare and simple Life, life-ing all around you and in you, foliage-garbage gifting you a love for this world and being part of it. You deeply inhale the fragrance of this leaf-trash, a sweet mixture of its living and dying. Perhaps, resting under the canopy of the Holy One, it is safe enough to feel your own tender living and dying, the preciousness of the kelipah of your body in the kelipah of this world cradling the fruit of your soul.

The Radzyner Rebbe also notes that God’s protection becomes available where human effort and ownership are relinquished. He explains that we humans categorize psolet, waste, as things we don’t eat or utilize. Once we have put in our good work and extracted the consumable parts of the grain or grapevine, what remains is no longer of use to us. When we divide the world into the categories of useful and not useful, we humans separate ourselves from the rest of creation and assert ourselves and all of our wants, striving, and owning at the center of importance. But sitting under the leafy leftovers, we shift perspective. We let the un-beautiful, un-beneficial leaves cover us in the care and protection that we can only know by setting down our drive, releasing into faith in what is beyond our control, our preferences and our self-generating, self-dependent efforts. Just sit in the lap of the Divine and receive. Be unproductive and allow an opening of the hands and a “gentling of the heart.” To paraphrase poet Laura Gilpin, let “nothing be wasted in nature or in love.” Let yourself be as useless and as precious as the dry vines over your sukkah so that you remember your home in the family of all life, so you remember that your worth isn’t dependent upon what can be extracted from you. 

I don’t press my own wine or grow and winnow my own grain. This year, however, I want to start the practice of adding to my schach the wilted flowers, fallen branches and shriveled plants from my garden and nearby woods. If you don’t have your own sukkah, perhaps you can gather what you would otherwise cut down and compost and give it a home above your head. May we be blessed with the gifts of holy husks and sacred leftovers this Sukkot. May they unfurl within us sweet, simple joy and freedom in the protection of this divine shelter. 

Timeless Time and Placeless Place (Yom Kippur 5787)

Timeless Time and Placeless Place (Yom Kippur 5787)

Sep 16, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Over the summer I sat my eldest son down for an important conversation. “Listen,” I said, and proceeded to play a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the closing section of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

Jonah was a film major in college and, former music major that I am, I have taken it upon myself to ensure that he knows something about the classical roots on which movie composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer draw. In addition to that, I had made a summer project for myself of listening to the complete Mahler symphony recordings that Bernstein made in the last decade of his life, which are among the cultural treasures of the late twentieth century.

In case you don’t know Mahler’s Third (or even if you do), listen here starting about 1:37:00. (Still Bernstein conducting, but a different recording.) It’s gorgeous. Mahler described it as the song of divine love. And if you listen starting at 1:43:30, over the next 30 seconds you’ll hear just about the most beautiful, full resolution of anything in your life. The music comes home, emphatically, to a D-Major chord that just goes on and on, reinforced by thumping timpani. This is a triumphant homecoming into a divine embrace. If you experience tears, they are likely tears of joy at the magnificence of the sound.

In the years after he composed the Third, Mahler suffered quite a bit: a near-death illness, the loss of a child, and continuing health problems. All of that affected his music. By the time he composed his Ninth Symphony a decade or so later, he was acutely aware of his mortality (and, in fact, he died the following year). If you listen to the final minutes (here’s Bernstein again; start around 1:18:00), you may find it conveys a kind of homecoming into a divine embrace, but in a very different way.

Mahler referred to this adagio movement as his farewell to the world, and thus there is nothing grand or triumphant here. No brass or timpani, just the faint sound of small gestures in the strings, the last gentle breaths of a human life. And there’s only the subtlest of resolutions: the violins end on an A-flat, part of the final D-flat Major chord but markedly not its home note, as though they are hanging in the ether. When performed live, the ending is one of the most magical moments in a concert hall, as thousands of people—including the musicians and the conductor—are in a netherworld, not knowing whether the music is still going or whether it has ended. If tears come, they are tears of a sadder, wiser sort.

Mahler famously observed, “I am thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” Yet he wrote these symphonies in which homecoming is such a profound theme. In this season of teshuva—returning to our deepest sense of home—I find myself reflecting on him, on the contrasting endings of these two symphonies, and what they might help us understand about our own experience of finding our way home.

“The paths of teshuva,” writes Maimonides (Laws of Repentance 2:4), include calling out to God, giving charity, changing our actions, and changing our names (“as if to say, ‘I am a different person’”). Finally, and perhaps summarily, one may “exile oneself from one’s home. Exile atones for sin because it causes a person to be submissive, humble, and meek of spirit.”

While the first part of the Rambam’s list is drawn from one Talmudic passage (Rosh Hashanah 16b), the last part quotes another (Sanhedrin 37b), which records three opinions about the efficacy of exile: The first says it atones for half a sin, the second for a whole sin, and the third, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan, says “exile atones for all transgressions.” Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, perhaps with Maimonides in mind, explains Rabbi Yochanan to mean that exile “renders the sinner like a new person.”

Exile is the polar opposite of being at home. Yet, the Rambam teaches, it is potentially a necessary part of the spiritual journey of homecoming. Part of the task of this season between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is to discern whether we are at home—and if not, what, if any, forms of exile the route home might entail.

“Where penitents (ba’alei teshuva) stand, the completely righteous cannot stand” (Brachot 34b). Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments: “A completely righteous person—that is, one who sees themselves as entirely complete and perfect in their words and actions—such a person is at a lower level than a penitent whose heart is broken within them.”

While Reb Simcha Bunim doesn’t use the words exile and home here, I think we can hear him playing in a similar key: If we are so sure that we are at home—in control of our lives and thus happy and satisfied with our own goodness—it could well be that we’re fooling ourselves. Look a little harder, perhaps. There is always more teshuva to do.

And yet we also need that self-assurance. We need to know we’re at home. As the Mishnah says about the search for chametz in our homes on the night before Pesach, we have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise ein l’davar sof, there would be no end.

In the conclusion of Mahler’s Third, I hear a homecoming that is strong and sturdy, a sense of home that doesn’t second-guess itself. At times we need that sense of at-homeness. Yet the end of Mahler’s Ninth offers a softer, subtler, perhaps more mature kind of homecoming, one that is sure of itself but doesn’t broadcast it, something more akin to the words of Rabbi Shefa Gold’s classic chant: “I am resting in this Divine embrace, timeless time and placeless place.”

Among the opportunities Yom Kippur invites us into is a rehearsal of our own death. That is one of the ways to understand abstaining from the quintessential physical behaviors that make us human: eating and drinking, wearing shoes, bathing, having sex, on top of the observances of Shabbat. On one level, that prefiguring of death is an experience of exile from our regular lives. On another, the exile opens up a path to come home—reborn, renewed, and capable of allowing our lives to be a sukkat shalom: a home gently holding and held in a Divine embrace. May we find our way to that home this year.

For Reflection & Conversation:

  • As you listen to the endings of Mahler’s Third and Ninth Symphonies, what do you hear in them? If you hear a kind of homecoming, what does that evoke for you—and how might it inform your experience of Yom Kippur?

A Broken Heart, A Stable Home (Rosh Hashanah 5787)

A Broken Heart, A Stable Home (Rosh Hashanah 5787)

Sep 9, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

In recent days, several friends have forwarded me an article from The Atlantic. It’s by Olga Khazan and it highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, a former academic researcher who has raised questions about potential negative health effects of meditation in some individuals. For Britton herself, and it would appear for some other folks too, meditation—most often in large doses of hours a day, as is often done on retreat—has contributed to difficulty sleeping, increased anxiety, and even psychosis, i.e. really serious stuff.

To me, the article read as more than a bit tendentious (In non-academese: it felt like Khazan had an ax to grind). Britton’s data set is, by her own admission, astonishingly small, yet the article implied broad conclusions from it, despite a requisite nod to the overwhelming number of studies demonstrating the positive effects of meditation practice. Choice quotes seemed to be deployed to make major meditation teachers look bad. Some who were left unnamed were quoted as telling participants suffering negative experiences on retreat to “just keep meditating,” advice which may have been normative a couple of decades ago but which, at least at IJS and among the folks I know, would not be given now.

(Indeed, one of the ironies here is that our faculty at IJS, along with many other teachers in the mindfulness meditation world, have worked hard to learn about and use trauma-informed pedagogies—including through training with Cheetah House, the organization that Britton founded and leads.)

But my point in bringing this up is not to offer a defensive rejoinder to the Atlantic article. It is rather to observe the process that followed the stimulus of encountering it. Because, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, I think it’s a great opportunity for some reflection.

I’m going to go out on a limb and conjecture at part of the dynamic in this case. It involves encountering a story in the news media—particularly in a publication that codes as college educated, politically liberal, smart, and yes, to many Jews, Jewish (the New York Times and The New Yorker are neighbors to The Atlantic in this media zip code). For not a few folks, if a claim is printed in one of these publications, then it takes on a kind of weight or truth. We instinctively give it the benefit of the doubt, before our minds have even had a chance to decide.

But in a case like this, that process collides with another belief: We trust meditation. We know from our own experience that it has been helpful in our lives. And, if you’re reading this, it might also be that you believe in IJS, you trust our teachers, you might even contribute to us (it’s never too late, btw). So there’s some motivated reasoning already churning in the background, and that can lead to a feeling of internal destabilization and conflict: We want to believe both of these things, but they seem to be diametrically opposed, and holding two truths can feel like it will break us apart on some level.

As my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius might say, “What an opportunity for practice!”

Regular readers will know that I’ve intentionally been writing about the experience of feeling at home for the last several months. (We also just wrapped up a 10-part miniseries on this topic over at the Soulful Jewish Living podcast.)

Regular readers may also know that one of my longstanding Elul practices is listening to a recording of the poet David Whyte. On this year’s encounter with it, my ear alit on a line in the final poem on the album, which is called Coleman’s Bed, in reference to a cave in the Burren region of County Clare. After inviting the reader/listener to “make a nest now” like Saint Kevin, who is said to have held his hands up long enough for a mother bird to have laid her egg and for the offspring to have hatched and flown away, Whyte writes:

and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.

Home, in this rendering, is a place or state of being in which “discordant elements” can reside together. That is different from the idea of home as a place of uniformity or homogeneity. In fact, it might even be a near total inversion: When we are at home, we feel strong and secure enough to contain multitudes (to quote another poet). Or, to turn it one more time, if we are able to hold contradictions, that’s a good sign we’re feeling at home.

Whyte continues:

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

Another definition of home here, though very much related to the first: Home is a state of being in which we can welcome guests—even, as Rumi might suggest, parts of ourselves. It is a place in which we can hold separation and brokenness within a larger frame of wholeness.

On Rosh Hashanah, that inevitably brings us to the shofar and the brokenness-inside-wholeness of the shofar blasts. The fact that the middle blasts are called shevarim, broken, has been the genesis of many a sermon. It connects us to the midrashic story that the broken first set of tablets were placed inside the Ark along with the whole ones, which the Talmud then connects to the way we continue to honor sages even when, in old age, they have forgotten their Torah (a poignant note for those of us caring for elders with dementia). And, of course, it can take us to the Kotzker Rebbe’s classic teaching: There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav had his own Torah of brokenness. One of his stories, quoted in the Itturei Torah of Rabbi Aharon Greenberg (an indispensable resource I refer to weekly), comments on the verse that introduces the shofar service: “Happy is the people that knows the teruah” (Psalms 89:16). Rebbe Nachman glosses: That is, “Who know the wisdom of a broken heart (shevirat ha-lev).”

He offers a parable:

A king sent his son far away to learn the seven wisdoms of the world. When the son returned full and filled with wisdom, the father wished to test him. He commanded him to lift a large stone to the top of the mountain. The son mustered all his strength and rolled the stone up the slope of the mountain, and after great effort, brought it up to the peak.

When he came to his father and recounted his immense toil in rolling the stone, the father shook his head and said: “Is this your wisdom? What entered your mind to carry a stone so hard and heavy to the top of the mountain? You should have broken it into small pieces, and then it would have been easy for you to carry it to its place.

Rebbe Nachman concludes: “The Holy One commanded us to lift our heart—which is hard and heavy like stone—and the best advice is to break the heart of stone and shatter it into fragments (shevarim).”

This is the anti-Sisyphus: There is no nobility in the endless struggle to exert brute force to move the boulder up the mountain. Rather, genuine wisdom comes through what Whyte might refer to as a “robust vulnerability”: Allowing the heart to break open, not expecting perfection. It is precisely in the letting go, the seeming surrender, the brokenness, that we can encounter a greater wholeness, a deeper experience of home.

“Above all, be alone with it all,” continues David Whyte, “a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise.” The silence, perhaps, between the blasts of the shofar. (To you shofar-blowers out there: perhaps there’s no need to rush. The silence has as much to offer as the sound.) He concludes with an image that, to me, evokes our ritual of Tashlikh, when we cast our sins into a moving body of water:

Become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond.

The sea is distinguished in being both container and that which we aim to contain. Which perhaps makes it a metaphor for the mind, or for our very sense of self (Spelled in reverse, yam, sea in Hebrew, is mi, who—as in, Who are you?)

To return to where we started: Of course meditation can have a shadow side. Everything can. That is one way to understand the story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which our progenitors did within moments of their creation, on Rosh Hashanah. As a result, multiplicity, contradiction, paradox, and the challenges—and opportunities—of living with them are hard-wired into the human condition.

On balance, there is little question in my mind that practicing to live with mindful awareness brings far more good into the world than not doing so. So as we begin this new year, I bless us all with the ability to allow our hearts to break open, to hold the pieces lightly and with care, to lovingly support each other on the journey up the mountain and toward the sea.